False Assurance Runaway Planet Media

Over 85% of Americans believe in God and think they are going to go to Heaven when they die. Is this confidence warranted? I don’t think so, particularly in light of the moral condition of our culture and Jesus’s stern warnings about being ill-prepared for his coming. Many people are walking around with a false assurance of salvation. Avoiding that is what this series is about. In it we will walk through characteristics of Christians who are not prepared to face eternity.

Many think of salvation as a one time legal transaction whereby your sins are forgiven and your name written in Heaven’s reservation book. As long as you have signed your name at some point in your life, judgment day will go just fine. As Don explains in this chapter, that is a false and dangerous idea which leads many to lead the wrong kind of lives, and ultimately keeps them out of heaven. To counter that notion, Don walks through several episodes in scripture that show God’s actual plan of redemption, revealing a pattern that shows how he creates new life and builds the family of God.

Does God require worship and sacrifice in order to make it to Heaven? Absolutely. Does that make him a capricious ego-maniac? Absolutely not. In this chapter Don looks at the meaning of worship and sacrifice, and shows how it relates to the very meaning of our existence: to love God and be loved by him. Unless we are willing to sacrifice, we will never enter into the relationship for which we were made, and ultimately will never enter into the place for which we were made, Heaven.

Pride is at the core of most other sin, and Satan knows that if he can get you to focus on your own glory instead of God’s, his battle is won. In this chapter Don covers two biblical stories of temptation in the wilderness, showing how those that focus on God’s glory are testing by him and pass, while those that focus on their own glory try to test God and fail. He also shows how to make sure you are part of the former group.

Without faith it is impossible to please God, according to the author of Hebrews. What does that mean, and how does it relate to being saved by grace? Is it just an intellectual thing, or is obedience involved? Don answers these questions and more in this chapter, walking the reader through a biblical theology of faith that avoids the extremist errors that plague American Christianity. He also provided a very practical way to test ourselves to see where we are placing our faith, because without faith in Jesus, we won’t make it into the Promised Land.

It is true that we are saved by grace through faith, and it is also true that faith without works is dead. In other words, if you arrive before the throne of God having done no works, it will mean you didn’t have saving faith? Don walks through this often misunderstood scriptural teaching, showing what works are and just how essential they are for salvation.